The Little House on the Marne

JULY, 1915

BY MILDRED ALDRICH

HUIRY-SUR-MARNE
June 3, 1914.
I DID not decide to come away into a little corner in the country, in the land in which I was not born, without looking at the move from all angles. Be sure that I know what I am doing, and I have found the place where I can do it. Some day you will see the new home, I hope, and then you will understand. I have lived more than sixty years. I have lived a fairly active life, and it has been, with all its hardships, — and they have been many, — interesting. But I have had enough of the city, — even of Paris, the most beautiful city in the world. Nothing can take any of that away from me. It is treasured up in my memory. But I have come to feel the need of calm and quiet — perfect peace. I know again that there is a sort of arrogance in expecting it; but I am going to make a bold bid for it. I will agree, if you like, that it is cowardly to say that my work is done. I will even agree that we both know plenty of women who have cheerfully gone on struggling to a far greater age, and I do think it downright pretty of you to find me younger than my years. Yet you must forgive me if I say that no one can decide for another the proper moment for striking one’s colors.

I am sure that you never heard of Huiry. Yet it is a little hamlet, less than thirty miles from Paris, in that district between Paris and Meaux which is little known to the ordinary traveler. It consists of less than a dozen rude farmhouses, less than five miles, as a bird flies, from Meaux, — which, with a fair cathedral, and a beautiful chestnut-shaded promenade on the banks of the Marne, spanned just there by lines of old mills whose water-wheels churn the river into foaming eddies, has never been popular with excursionists. Some people go there to see where Bossuet wrote his funeral orations, in a little summer-house on the wall of the garden of the Archbishop’s palace; now, since the ' separation,’ the property of the State, and soon to be a town museum. It is not a very attractive town: it has not even an out-of-doors restaurant to tempt the passing automobilist.

My house was, when I leased it, little more than a peasant’s hut. It is considerably over one hundred and fifty years old, with stables and outbuildings attached whimsically, and boasts six gables. Is it not a pity, for early associations’ sake, that it has not one more?

I have, as Traddles used to say, ‘Oceans of room, Copperfield,’ and no joking. I have on the ground floor of the main building a fair-sized salon, into which the front door opens directly. Over that I have a long narrow bedroom and dressing-room, and above that, in the eaves, a sort of attic workshop. In an attached one-story addition, with a gable, at the west of the salon, I have a library lighted from both east and west. Behind the salon on the west side I have a double room which serves as diningand breakfast-rooms, with a guest-chamber above. The kitchen, at the north side of the salon, has its own gable, and there is an old stable extending forward at the north side, and an old grange extending west from the dining-room. It is a jumble of roofs and chimneys, like the houses I used to combine from my Noah’s Ark box in the days of my babyhood.

But much as I like all this, it was not this that attracted me here, but the situation. The house stands in a small garden, separated from the road by an old gnarled hedge of hazel. It is almost on the crest of the hill on the south bank of the Marne, — the hill that is the watershed between the Marne and the Grand Morin. Just here the Marne makes a wonderful loop, and is only fifteen minutes’ walk away from my gate, down the hill to the north.

From the lawn, on the north side of the house, I command a panorama which I have rarely seen equaled. To me it is more beautiful than that which we have so often looked at together from the terrace at St. Germain. In the west the new part of Esbly climbs the hill; and from there to a hill at the northeast I have a wide view of the valley of the Marne, backed by a low line of hills which is the watershed between the Marne and the Aisne. Low down in the valley, at the northwest, lies Île de Villenoy, like a toy town, where the big bridge spans the Marne to carry the railroad into Meaux. On the horizon line to the west the tall chimneys of Claye send lines of smoke into the air. In the foreground to the north, just at the foot of the hill, are the roofs of two little hamlets, — Joncheroy and Voisins, — and beyond them the trees that border the canal. On the other side of the Marne the undulating hill, with its wide stretch of fields, is dotted with little villages that peep out of the trees or are silhouetted on the sky-line. On clear days I can see the square tower of the cathedral at Meaux, and I have only to walk a short distance on the route nationale (which runs from Paris, across the top of my hill a little to the east, thence to Meaux and on to the frontier), to get a profile view of it standing above the town, quite detached, from foundation to clock-tower.

This is a rolling country of grainfields, orchards, masses of black-currant bushes, and vegetable plots. It is what the French call ‘ une paysage riante,’ and I assure you it does more than smile these lovely June mornings. I am up every morning almost as soon as the sun, and I slip my feet into sabots, wrap myself in a big cloak, and run right on to the lawn to make sure that the panorama has not disappeared in the night. There it always lies — too good, almost, to be true: miles and miles of laughing country; little white towns just smiling in the early light; a thin strip of river here and there, dimpling and dancing; stretches of fields of all colors, — all so peaceful and so gay and so ‘chummy,’ that it gladdens the opening day, and makes me rejoice to have lived to see it. I never weary of it. It changes every hour, and I never can decide at which hour it is the loveliest. After all, it is a rather nice world.

I used to think, and I continued to think for a long time, that I could not live if my feet did not press a city pavement. The fact that I have changed my mind seems to me, at my age, a sufficient excuse for, as frankly, changing my habits. It surely proves that I have not a sick will — yet. In the simple life I crave, — digging in the earth, living out of doors, — I expect to earn the strength of which city life and city habits were robbing me. I believe I can. Faith half wins a battle.

In any case you have no occasion to worry about me. I’ve a head full of memories. I am going to classify them, as I do my books. Some of them I am going to forget, just as I reject books that have ceased to interest me. I know the latter is always a wrench. The former may be impossible. I shall not be lonely. No one who reads is ever that. I may miss talking. Perhaps that is a good thing. I may have talked too much. That does happen. Remember one thing: I am not inaccessible. I may now and then get an opportunity to talk again, and in a new background. Who knows? I am counting on nothing but the facts about me. So come on, Future. I ’ ve my back against the past. Anyway, as you see, it is too late to argue. I have crossed the Rubicon; I can return only when I have built a new bridge.

June 18, 1914.
I am now absolutely settled in my little ‘hole’ in the country, as you call it. It has been so easy. I have been here now nearly three weeks. Everything is in perfect order. You would be amazed if you could see just how everything fell into place. The furniture has behaved itself beautifully. There are days when I wonder if either I or it ever lived anywhere else. The shabby old furniture with which you were long so familiar just slipped right into place. I had not a stick too little, and could not have placed another piece. I call that ‘bull luck.'

Don’t harp on that word ‘alone.’ I know I am living alone, in a house that has four outside doors into the bargain. But you know I am not one of the afraid kind. I am not boasting. That is a characteristic, not a quality. One is afraid or one is not. It happens that I am not. Still, I am very prudent. You would laugh if you could see me ‘shutting up’ for the night. All my windows on the ground floor are heavily barred. Such of the doors as have glass in them have shutters also. The window shutters are primitive affairs of solid wood, with diamond-shaped holes in the upper part. First I put up the shutters on the door in the dining-room which leads into the garden on the south side; then I lock the door. Then I do a similar service to the kitchen door on to the front terrace, and that into the orchard, and lock both doors. Then I go out the salon door, and lock the stable and the grange and take out the keys. Then I come into the salon and lock the door after me, and push two of the biggest bolts you ever saw. After which I hang up the keys, which are as big as the historic key of the Bastille, which you may remember to have seen at the Musée Carnavalet. Then I close and bolt all the shutters downstairs. I do it systematically every night — because I promised not to be foolhardy. I always grin, and feel as if it were a scene in a play. It impresses me so much like a tremendous piece of business — dramatic suspense — which leads up to nothing except my going quietly upstairs to bed.

Never in my life—anywhere, under any circumstances — have I been so well taken care of. I have a femme de ménage — a sort of cross between a housekeeper and a maid-of-all-work. She is a married woman, the wife of a farmer whose house is three minutes away from mine.

Her husband’s name is Abélard. Oh, yes, of course, I asked him about Héloise the first time I saw him, and I was staggered when the little old toothless chap giggled and said, ‘That was before my time.’ What do you think of that? Every one calls him ‘Père Abélard,’ and about the house it is shortened down to ‘Père.’ He is over twenty years older than Amélie— well along in his seventies.

You have no idea how little money these people spend. It must hurt them terribly to cough up their taxes. They all till the land, and eat what they grow. Amélie’s husband spends exactly four cents a week — to get shaved on Sunday. He can’t shave himself. A razor scares him to death. He looks as if he were going to the guillotine when he starts for the barber’s, but she will not stand for a beard of more than a week’s growth. He always stops at my door on his way back, to let his wife kiss his clean old face, all wreathed with smiles

— the ordeal is over for another week. He never needs a sou except for that shave. He drinks nothing but his own cider. He eats his own vegetables, his own rabbits: he never goes anywhere except to the fields — does not want to — unless it is to play the violin for a dance or a fête. He just works, eats, sleeps, reads his newspaper, and is content. Yet he pays taxes on nearly a hundred thousand francs’ worth of real estate.

June 29, 1914.
I have just received your letter — the last, you say, that you can send before you sail away again for ‘ The Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave,’ where you still seem to feel that it is my duty to return to die. I vow I will not discuss that with you again.

If ever you relent and come to see me, I can take you for some lovely walks. I can, on a Sunday afternoon, in good weather, even take you to the theatre, — what is more, to the theatre to see the players of the Comédie Française. It is only half an hour’s walk from my house to Pont aux Dames, where Coquelin set up his Maison du Retraitefor aged actors, and where he died and is buried. In the old park, where the Du Barry used to walk in the days when Louis XVI clapped her in prison on a warrant wrung from the dying old King, her royal lover, there is an openair theatre, and there, on Sundays, the actors of the Théâtre Française play, within sight of the tomb of the founder of the retreat, under the very trees — and they are stately and noble—where the Du Barry walked.

The morning paper — always late here — brings the startling news of the assassination of the Crown Prince of Austria. What an unlucky family that has been! Franz Joseph must be a tough old gentleman to have stood up against so many shocks.

July 16, 1914.
Absolutely no news to write you, unless you will consider it news that my hedge of dahlias, which I planted myself a month ago, is coming up like nothing else in the world but Jack’s Beanstalk. Nothing but weeds ever grew so rank before.

July 30, 1914.
This will be only a short letter — more to keep my promise to you than because I feel in the mood to write. Events have broken that. It looks, after all, as if the Servian affair was to become a European affair, and that what looked as if it might happen during the Balkan war is really coming to pass, — a general European uprising. I am sitting here this morning, as I suppose all France is doing, simply holding my breath to see what England is going to do. The tension here is terrible. The faces of the men are stern, and every one is so calm — the silence is deadly. There is an absolute suspension of work in the fields. It is as if all France were holding its breath.

One word before I forget it again. You say that you have asked me twice if I have any friend near me. I am sure I have already answered that — yes! I have a family of friends at Voulangis, about two miles the other side of Crécyen-Brie. Of course neighbors do not see one another in the country as often as in the city, but there they are; so I hasten to relieve your mind just now, when there is a menace of war, and I am sitting tight on my hilltop on the road to the frontier.

August 2, 1914.
Well, dear, what looked impossible is evidently coming to pass. Early yesterday morning the garde champêtre — who is the only thing in the way of a policeman that we have — marched up the road beating his drum. At every crossroad he stopped and read an order. I heard him at the foot of the hill, but I waited for him to pass. At the top of the hill he stopped to paste a bill on the door of the carriage-house on Père Abélard’s farm, You can imagine me — in my long studio apron, with my head tied up in a muslin cap — running up the hill to join the group of poor women of the hamlet, to read the proclamation to the Armies of Land and Sea, — the order for the mobilization of the French military and naval forces, — headed by its crossed French flags. It was the first experience in my life of a thing like that. I had a cold chill down my spine as I realized that it was not so easy as I had thought to separate myself from Life. We stood there together — a little group of women — and silently read it through. No need for the men to read it. Each, with his military papers in his pocket, knew the moment he heard the drum what it meant, and knew equally well his place. I was a foreigner among them, but I forgot that, and if any of them remembered they made no sign.

It came as sort of a shock, though I might have realized it yesterday when several of the men of the commune came to say au revoir, with the information that they were joining their regiments; but I felt as if some way other than cannon might be found out of the situation. War had not been declared — has not to-day. Still, things rarely go to this length and stop. Judging by this morning’s papers Germany really wants it. August 3, 1914.
War is declared. I passed a rather restless night. I fancy every one in France did. All night I heard a murmur of voices, — an unusual thing here. It simply meant that the town was awake, and, the night being warm, every one was out of doors.

All day to-day aeroplanes have been flying between Paris and the frontier. Everything that flies seems to go right over my roof. Early this morning I saw two machines meet, right over my garden, circle about one another as if signaling, and fly off together. I could not help feeling as if one chapter of Wells’s War in the Air had come to pass.

I am closing this up rather hurriedly, as one of the boys who joins his regiment at Fontainebleau will mail it in Paris as he passes through. I suppose you are glad that you got away before this came to pass?

August 10, 1914.
I have your cable asking me to come ‘home,’ as you call it. Alas, my home is where my books are — they are here. Thanks all the same.

It is a week since I wrote you — and what a week! We have had a sort of intermittent communication with the outside world since the sixth, when, after a week of deprivation, we began to get letters and an occasional newspaper, brought over from Meaux by a boy on a bicycle.

After we were certain, on the fourth of August, that war was being declared all around Germany and Austria, and that England was to back France and Russia, a sort of stupor settled on us all. Day after day Amélie would run to the mairie at Quincy to read the telegraphic bulletin — half a dozen lines of facts; that was all we knew from day to day. It is all we know now.

Since the day when war was declared, even here in this litt le commune, whose silence is broken only by the rumbling of the trains passing in view of my garden, on the way to the frontier, and by the footsteps of the groups on the way to the train, I have seen sights that have moved me as nothing I have ever met in life before has done. Day after day, I have watched the men and their families pass silently, and an hour later seen the women come back leading the children. One day I went to Couilly to see if it was yet possible for me to get to Paris. I happened to be in the station when a train was going out. Nothing goes over the line yet but men joining their regiments. They were packed in like sardines. There were no uniforms, — just a crowd of men: men in blouses, men in patched jackets, well-dressed men, — no distinction of class; and on the platform the women and children they were leaving. There was no laughter, none of the gayety with which one has so often reproached this race — but neither were there any tears. As the crowded train began to move, bare heads were thrust out of windows, hats were waved, and a great shout of ‘ Vive la France! ’ was answered by piping children’s voices, and the choked voices of women — ‘Vive l’Armée!' And when the train was out of sight the women took the children by the hand and quietly climbed the hill.

Ever since the fourth of August all our crossroads have been guarded, all our railway gates closed and also guarded, — guarded by men whose only signs of being soldiers are caps and guns, men in blouses with mobilization badges on their left arms, often in patched trousers and sabots, with stern faces and determined eyes; and one thought: ‘The country is in danger.’

There is a crossroad just above my house, which commands the valley on either side, and leads to a little hamlet on the route nationale from Couilly to Meaux, and is called ‘La Demi-Lune, — why ‘Half Moon,’ I don’t know. It was there, on the sixth, that I saw for the first t ime an armed barricade. The gate at the railway crossing had been opened to let a cart pass, when an automobile dashed through St. Germain, which is on the other side of the track. The guard raised his bayonet in the air, to command the car to stop and show its papers, but it flew by him and dashed up the hill. The poor guard — it was his first experience of that sort — stood staring after the car, but the idea that he ought to fire at it did not occur to him until it was too late. By the time it occurred to him and he could telephone to the Demi-Lune, it had passed that guard in 1 he same way — and disappeared. It did not pass Meaux. It simply disappeared. It is still known as the ‘Phantom Car.’ Within half an hour there was a barricade at the Demi-Lune, mounted by armed men, — too late, of course. However, it was not really fruitless, that barricade, as the very next day they caught three Germans there, disguised as sisters of charity — papers all in order. They were detected by a little boy’s calling attention to their ungloved hands; but even then they would have got by if it had not been for the number of armed old men on the barricade.

What makes things especially serious here, so near the frontier, and where the military movements must be made, is the presence of so many Germans and the bitter feeling there is against them. On the night of August second, just when the troops were beginning to move east, an attempt was made to blow up the railroad bridge at Île de Villenoy, between here and Meaux. The three Germans were caught with the dynamite on them, — so the story goes, — and are now in the barracks at Meaux. But the most absolute secrecy is preserved about all such things. Not only is all France under martial law, but the censorship of the press is absolute. Every one has to carry his papers and be provided with a passport, for which he is liable to be asked in simply crossing a road.

Meaux is full of Germans. The biggest department shop there is a German enterprise. Even Couilly has two. One of them — the barber — got out quick. The other did not. But he was quietly informed by some of his neighbors, — pistols in hand, — that his room was better than his company.

The barber occupied a shop in the one principal street in the village, which is, by the way, a comparatively rich place. He had a front shop, which was a cafe, with a well-fitted-up bar. The back, with a well-dressed window on the street, full of toilet articles, was the shaving and hair-dressing room, very neatly arranged, with modern set bowls and mirrors, cabinets full of towels, well-filled shelves of all the things that make such a place profitable. You should see it now. Its broken windows and doors stand open to the weather. The entire interior has been ‘ efficiently ’ wrecked. It is as systematic a work of destruction as I have ever seen. Not a thing was stolen, but not an article was spared. All the bott les full of things to drink and all the glasses to drink out of are smashed; so are counters, tables, chairs, and shelves. In the barber shop there is a litter of broken porcelain, broken combs, smashed-up chairs and boxes, among a wreck of hair-dyes, perfumes, brilliantine, and torn towels, and an odor of apéritifs and cologne over it all. Every one pretends not to know when it happened. They say, ‘It was found like that one morning.’ Every one goes to look at it — no one enters, no one touches anything. They simply say, with a smile of scorn, ‘ Good — and so well done.’

There are many things that I wish you could see. They would give you such a new point of view regarding this race — traditionally so gay, so indifferent to many things that you consider moral, so fond of their individual comfort and personal pleasure, and often so rebellious to discipline. You would be surprised, — surprised at their unity, surprised at their seriousness, and often touched by their philosophical acceptance of it all.

Amélie’s step-daughter is married to a big burly chap by the name of Georges Godot. He is a thick-necked, red-faced man, in the dynamite corps on the railroad, —the construction department. He is used to hardships. War is as good as anything else to him. When he came to say good-bye, he said, ‘Well, if I have the luck to come back, so much the better. If I don’t, that will be all right . You can put a placque down below in the cemetery with “ Godot, Georges. Died for the country.” And when my boys grow up, they can say to their comrades, “ Papa, you know, he died on the battlefield.” It wall be a sort of distinction I am not likely to earn for them any other way.’ And off he went. Rather fine for a man of that class.

Even the women make no cry. As for the children, even when you would think that they were old enough to understand the meaning of these partings, they make no sign, though they seem to understand all the rest of it well enough. There is n’t a boy of eight in our commune who cannot tell you how it all came about, and who is not just now full of stories of 1870, which he has heard from grandma and grandpa; for, as is natural, every one talks of 1870 now. I have lived among these people, loved them, and believed in them, even when their politics annoyed me; but I confess that they have given me a surprise.

August 17, 1914.
For days now the women and children have been climbing the hill at six in the morning, with big hats on their heads, deep baskets on their backs, low stools in their hands. There is a big field of black-currant bushes beside my garden to the south. All day, in the heat, they sit under the bushes, picking away. At sundown, they carry their heavy baskets to the weighingmachine by the roadside at the foot of the hill, and stand in line to be weighed in and paid by the English buyers for Crosse and Blackwell, Beach, and such houses, who have, I suppose, some special means of transportation.

That is, however, the regular work for the women and children. Getting in the grain is not. Yet if you could see them take hold of it, you would love them. The old men do a double amount. Amélie’s husband is over seventy. His own work in his fields and orchard would seem too much for him. Yet he and Amélic and the donkey are in the fields by three o’clock every morning, and by nine o’clock, he is marching down the hill, with his rake and hoe on his shoulder, to help his neighbors.

I have just heard that there are two trains a day on which civilians can go up to Paris, if there are places left after the army is accommodated. There is no guaranty that I can get back the same day. Still, I am going to risk it. I am afraid to be any longer without money, though goodness knows what I can do with it. Besides, I find that all my friends are flying, and I feel as if I should like to say good-bye. I don’t know why, but I feel like indulging the impulse.

August 24, 1914.
Nothing going on here except the passing now and then of a long line of Paris street busses on the way to the front. They are all mobilized and going as heroically to the front as if they were human, and going to get smashed up just the same. It does give me a queer sensation to see them climbing this hill. The little Montmartre-St. Pierre bus, that climbs the hill to the funicular in front of Sacré Coeur, came up bravely. It was built to climb a hill. But the Bastille—Madeleine and the Ternes-Filles de Calvaire and the St. Sulpice-Villette just groaned and panted, and had to have their traction changed every few steps. I thought they would never get up, but they did. Another day it was the automobile delivery wagons of the Louvre, the Bon Marché, the Printemps, PetitSt. Thomas, La Belle Jardinière, Potin, — all the automobiles with which you are so familiar in the streets of Paris. Of course, these are much lighter, and came up bravely. As a rule, they are all loaded. It is as easy to take men and material to the front that way as by railroad, since the cars must go. Only once have I seen any attempt at pleasantry on these occasions. One procession went out t he other day with all sorts of funny inscriptions, some not at all pretty, many blackguarding the Kaiser, and, of course, one with the inevitable, ‘À Berlin,’ the first battlecry of 1870. This time there has been very little of that. I confess it gave me a kind of shiver to see ‘À Berlin — pour notre plaisir’ all over the bus.

September 3, 1914.
Since the Germans crossed the frontier, our news of the war has been meagre. We got the calm, constant reiteration, ‘Left wing, held by the English, forced to retreat a little.’ All the same, the general impression was that, in spite of that, ‘all was well.’

It was not until Tuesday afternoon — day before yesterday — that I got my first hint of the truth. That afternoon, while I was standing on the platform, I heard a drum beat in the street and sent Amélie out to see what was going on. She came back at once to say that it was the garde champêtre calling on the inhabitants to carry all their guns, revolvers, and so forth, to the mairie before sundown. That meant the disarming of our departement, and it flashed through my mind that the Germans must be nearer than the official announcements had told us.

While I stood reflecting a moment, — it looked serious, — I saw approaching from the west side of the track a procession of wagons. Amélie ran down the track to the crossing to see what it meant, and came back at once to tell me that they were evacuating the towns to the north of us.

I handed the basket of fruit I was holding into a coach of the train just pulling into the station, and threw my last package of cigarettes after it; and, without a word, Amélie and I went into the street, untied the donkey, climbed into the wagon, and started for home.

By the time we got to the road which leads east to Montry, whence there is a road over the hill to the south, it was full of the flying crowd. It was a sad sight. The procession led in both directions as far as we could see. There were huge wagons of grain, herds of cattle, flocks of sheep; wagons full of household effects, with often as many as twenty people sitting aloft; carriages; automobiles with the occupants crowded in among bundles done up in sheets; women pushing overloaded handcarts; women pushing baby-carriages; dogs and cats and goats; and every sort of a vehicle you ever saw, drawn by every sort of beast that can draw, from dogs to oxen, from boys to donkeys. Here and there there was a man on horseback, riding along the line, trying to keep it moving in order and to encourage the weary. Every one was calm and silent. There was no talking, no complaining.

The whole road was blocked, however, and, even if our donkey had desired to pass, —which she did not, — we could not. We simply fell into the procession, as soon as we found a place. Amélie and I did not say a word to one another until we reached the road that turns off to the Château de Condé; but I did speak to a man on horseback, who proved to be the intendant of one of the chateaux at Daumarlin, and to another who was the mayor. I simply asked from where these people had come, and was told they were evacuating Daumartin and all the towns on the plain between there and Meaux, which meant that all the villages visible from my garden were being evacuated by order of the military powers.

One of the most disquieting things about this was to see the effect of the procession as it passed along the road. All the way from Esbly to Montry people began to pack at once, and the speed with which they fell into the procession was disconcerting.

When we finally escaped from the crowd into the poplar-shaded avenue which leads to the Château de Condé, I turned to look at Amelie for the first time. I had had time to get a good hold of myself.

‘Well, Amélie?’ I said.

‘Oh, madame,’ she replied, ‘I shall stay.’

‘And so shall I,’ I answered; but I added, ‘I think I must make an effort to get to Paris to-morrow, and I think you had better come with me. I shall not go, of course, unless I am sure of being able to get back. We may as well face the truth: if this means that Paris is in danger, or if it means that we may in our turn be forced to move on, I must get some money so as to be ready.’

‘Very well, madame,’ she replied, as cheerfully as if the rumble of the procession behind were not still in our ears.

The next morning — that was yesterday, September 2 — I woke just before daylight. There was a continual rumble in the air. At first I thought it was the passing of more refugees on the noad. I t hrew open my blinds, and then realized that the noise was in the other direction, — from the route nationale. I listened. I said to myself, ‘ If that is not artillery then I never heard any.’

Sure enough, when Amélie came to get breakfast, she announced that the English were at the Demi-Lune. The infantry was camped there, and the artillery had descended to Couilly and was mounting the hill on the other side of the Morin, — between us and Paris.

I said a sort of ‘Hm,’ and told her to ask Pere to harness at once. As we had no idea of the hours of the trains, or even if there were any, it was best to get to Esbly as early as possible. It was nine o’clock when we arrived, to find that there should be a train at halfpast. The station was full. I hunted up the chef de gare, and asked him if I could be sure of being able to return if I went up to Paris.

He looked at me in perfect amazement.

‘You want to come back?’ he asked,

‘Sure,’ I replied.

‘You can, if you take a train about four. That may be the last.’

I very nearly said, ‘ Jiminy-cricket! ’

The train ran into the station on time, but you never saw such a sight. It was packed as the Brookline street cars used to be on the days of a baseball game. Men were absolutely hanging on the roof; women were packed on the steps that led up to the imperials to the third-class coaches. It was a perilous-looking sight. I opened a dozen coaches — all packed, standing room as well as seats, which is ordinarily against the law. I was about to give it up when a man said to me, ‘ Madame, there are some coaches at the rear that look as if they were empty.’

I made a dash down the long platform, yanked open a door, and was about to ask if I might get in, when I saw that the coach was full of wounded soldiers in khaki, lying about on the floor as well as the seats. I was so shocked that if the station-master, who had run after me, had not caught me I should have fallen backward.

‘Sh! madame,’ he whispered, ‘I’ll find you a place.’ And in another moment I found myself, with Amélie, in a compartment where there were already eight women, a young man, two children, and heaps of hand-luggage, — bundles in sheets, twine bags just bulging, paper parcels, and valises. Almost as soon as we were in, the train pulled slowly out of the station.

I learned from the women that Meaux was being evacuated. No one was remaining but the soldiers in the barracks and the Archbishop. They had been ordered out by the army the night before, and the railroad was taking them free. They were escaping with what they could carry in bundles, as they could take no luggage. Their calm was remarkable, — not a complaint from any one. They were of all classes, but the barriers were down.

The young man had come from farther up the line, — a newspaper chap, who had given me his seat and was sitting on a bundle. I asked him if he knew where the Germans were, and he replied that on this wing they were at Compiègne, that the centre was advancing on Coulommier, but he did not know where the Crown Prince’s division was.

I was glad I had made the effort to get to town, for this began to look as if they might succeed in arriving before the circle of steel that surrounds Paris, and God knows what good that seventy-live miles of fortifications will be against the long-range cannon that battered down Liège. I had only one wish,

— to get back to my hut on the hill; I did not seem to want anything else.

Just before the train ran into Lagny — our first stop — I was surprised to see British soldiers washing their horses in the river; so I was not surprised to find the station full of men in khaki. They were sleeping on benches along the wall, and standing about in groups. As to many of the French on the train this was their first sight of the men in khaki, and as there were Scotch there in their kilts, there was a good deal of excitement.

The train made a long stop in the effort to put more people into the already overcrowded coaches. I leaned forward, wishing to get some news, and the funny thing was that I could not think how to speak to those boys in English. You may think that an affectation. It was n’t. Finally I desperately sang out, ‘Hallo, boys!’

You should have seen them dash for the window. I suppose that their native tongue sounded good to them so far from home.

‘ Where did you come from? ’ I asked.

‘From up yonder — a place called La Fère,’ one of them replied.

‘What regiment?’ I asked.

‘Any one else here speak English?’ he questioned, running his eyes along the faces thrust out of the windows.

I told him no one did.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘we are all that is left of the North Irish Horse and a regiment of Scotch Borderers.’

‘What are you doing here?’

‘Retreating — and waiting for orders. How far are we from Paris?’

I told him about seventeen miles. He sighed and said that he thought they were nearer, and, as the train started, I had the idea in the back of my head that these boys actually expected to retreat inside the fortifications. La! la!

Instead of the half hour the train usually takes to get up from here to Paris, we were two hours.

I found Paris much more normal than I had expected it to be; nevertheless, it was still quite unlike itself: every one perfectly calm and no one with the slightest suspicion that the battle-line was so near, — hardly more than ten miles beyond the outer forts. I transacted my business quickly — saw only one person, and caught the four o’clock train back. We were almost the only passengers.

Just after we left Esbly, I saw an English officer standing in his stirrups and signaling across a field, where I discovered a detachment of English art illery going toward the hill. A little farther along the road, we met a couple of English officers, pipes in their mouths and sticks in their hands, strolling along as quietly and smilingly as if there were no such thing as war. The sight of them and their cannon made me feel a bit serious. I thought to myself, ‘If the Germans are not expected here — well, it looks like it.'

We finished the journey in silence, and I was so t ired when I got home that I fell into bed and drank only a glass of milk t hat Amélie insisted on pouring down my throat.

(To be continued.)